Lead qualification is salespeople’s bread and butter. It helps you determine which leads are truly opportunities and are open to purchasing. Regardless of which method you use (BANT, CHAMP, or GPCTBA/C&I, or something else), lead qualification brings you one step closer to completing a sale.

Salespeople that qualify leads have a set of standard questions they ask. However, those questions only go so far—they don’t lend themselves to deeper conversations that the salesperson needs to have to close the deal. Read on to learn what questions you should really be asking, and what steps you should take before asking those questions.

Typical Lead Qualification Questions

Here’s what a typical set of lead qualification questions looks like:

• What size is the company?
• What vertical is the company in?
• What’s in the company’s technology stack—will it support this solution?
• What’s the lead’s role in the company?
• How many stakeholders are involved in this decision?
• What does the purchasing timeline look like?

These questions are important, but they could also be asked through a drop-down menu on a website. What you really need to do is ask questions that lead to deeper conversations so that you can really get to know the lead.

What Lead Qualifications Should You Really Be Asking?

Here’s how to have a conversation that will give you better insight into your lead (and create a better outcome): ask better questions. Here are the questions we believe will get you to where you want to be:

• Has this situation always been this way? Tell me about that. This question prompts the prospect to reflect on what things were like before the problem cropped up. The goal of reflection is to encourage the prospect to think about how to solve the problem.
• On a scale of zero to it’s-killing-you, how painful is this area? This question lets you discover how serious this issue is to your prospect. The more serious it is, the more urgent your solution is.
• What keeps you awake at night? This might sound like a personal question. Like the previous question, it’s designed to figure out how important this problem is to your prospect. However, there’s an added component—it’s not just about the pain the prospect is in, it’s about whether this issue is a source of worry for them and could affect their job and the company as a whole.
• What are your top priorities when making this decision? To qualify a lead, you need to understand what values the prospect considers when deciding to make a purchase. This information helps you better connect to the prospect to transform him or her into a lead, and ideally into a customer.
• If we decide it’s a good fit, what or who will be our biggest obstacle to getting this deal signed? When it comes to closing a deal, there’s always some kind of barrier. Sometimes it’s a thing (like a budget or policy), and sometimes it’s a person who stands in the way. Knowing up front what impediments you face allows you to prepare and successfully close the sale.

What Do You Need to Do before Asking Lead Qualification Questions?

In order to get to the point where you can even ask lead qualification questions, you need to follow up with prospects. In fact, many prospects want to hear from you. Research shows that 19% of buyers want to connect with a salesperson during the awareness stage of the buying process.

Many prospects get lost in the shuffle, though. The salesperson doesn’t follow up with them, usually because he or she simply doesn’t have the time. But what if sales departments had a tool that would follow up with 100% of prospects, 100% of the time?

Conversica’s virtual sales assistant does just that. It sends personalized emails to all of your prospects after they download a premium asset or request an appointment. The emails are so convincing, prospects feel as if they are communicating with an actual person. You can program them to follow up with a prospect a certain number of times until it becomes clear the person isn’t interested. If the prospect is interested, the virtual sales assistant will hand over the prospect to a salesperson.

To see Conversica in action, click here for a live demo.